The subject invention relates generally to thermal ink jet printers, and is directed more particularly to a technique for determining the thermal turn on energy of a thermal ink jet printhead while the printhead is installed in a printer.
An ink jet printer forms a printed image by printing a pattern of individual dots at particular locations of an array defined for the printing medium. The locations are conveniently visualized as being small dots in a rectilinear array. The locations are sometimes called "dot locations", "dot positions", or "pixels". Thus, the printing operation can be viewed as the filling of a pattern of dot locations with dots of ink.
Ink jet printers print dots by ejecting very small drops of ink onto the print medium, and typically include a movable carriage that supports one or more printheads each having ink ejecting nozzles. The carriage traverses over the surface of the print medium, and the nozzles are controlled to eject drops of ink at appropriate times pursuant to command of a microcomputer or other controller, wherein the timing of the application of the ink drops is intended to correspond to the pattern of pixels of the image being printed.
The printheads of thermal ink jet printers are commonly implemented as replaceable printhead cartridges which typically include one or more ink reservoirs and an integrated circuit printhead that includes a nozzle plate having an array of ink ejecting nozzles, a plurality of ink firing chambers adjacent respective nozzles, and a plurality of heater resistors adjacent the firing chambers opposite the ink ejecting nozzles and spaced therefrom by the firing chambers. Each heater resistor causes an ink drop to be fired from its associated nozzle in response to an electrical pulse of sufficient energy.
A thermal ink jet printhead requires a certain minimum energy to fire ink drops of the proper volume (herein called the turn on energy). Turn on energy can be different for different printhead designs, and in fact varies among different samples of a given printhead design as a result of manufacturing tolerances. As a result, thermal ink jet printers are configured to provide a fixed ink firing energy that is greater than the expected highest turn on energy for the printhead cartridges it can accommodate.
A consideration with utilizing a fixed ink firing energy is that firing energies excessively greater than the actual turn on energy of a particular printhead cartridge result in a shorter operating lifetime for the heater resistors and degraded print quality. Another consideration with utilizing a fixed ink firing energy is the inability to utilize newly developed or revised printheads that have ink firing energy requirements that are different from those for which existing thermal ink jet printers have been configured.
It would be possible for a printhead cartridge manufacturer to test each printhead for turn on energy prior to distribution, but known techniques for determining turn-on energy (e.g., by detecting ink drop volume or ink drop velocity) are complex and time consuming, and are not readily adapted to production manufacturing. Moreover, the turn on energy of a printhead might not remain constant throughout its useful life.